A Bid Longer Description

Trait theory is among the oldest approaches to explaining personality. According to this approach, your personality is the result of some external force. For the ancient Chinese, who you are is determined by the year in which you are born. If you are born in the year of the rat, your personality and fortune will be different from someone born in the year of the ox. Similarly, the ancient Greeks explained personality by four elements of life, each of which was related to a specific body fluid. You might be born sanguine (happy) or melancholic (sad). But your temperament was predetermined by these elements. In the 1930’s, Gordon Allport used a lexiconic approach. Personality could be described by words found in our language, specifically in our dictionaries. Starting with 17,953 adjectives, Allport reduced the list of possible traits (getting rid of redundant meanings) to about 4000 traits. Although people had traits that could not easily be defined in a single word, Allport maintained that the best way to compare people was to use these common traits. Raymond Cattell later reduced Allport's list down to 16 personality factors. He believed that a limited number of traits were underlying the thousands of words used to describe people. Cattell was among the first to use a statistical technique (factor analysis) to determine which words went together and which described a different trait. Factor analysis was also used by many others. Hans Eysenck used the method to identify two major personality dimensions: neuroticism and introversion-extroversion. He then tied each dimension to a physiological process of the brain. More recently, a series of researchers used factor analysis to describe the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. But factor analysis is not the only approach to describing personality traits. In the 1940's, William Sheldon hypothesized that personality and body type were tied together. He believed short-fat people were jolly, muscular-square people were strong willed, and thin-tall people were shy. Sheldon's theory was not based on statistics, just observations made on a biased sample of college students. Henry Murray moved personality theory from the outside to the inside. He proposed that personality is really a reflection of inner psychic needs. Like Sheldon, Murray's theory was not based on empirical data. His theory reflected his believe in psychoanalysis. Murray is also known for creating a popular projective personality test:  the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).